When the Linux kernel developers no longer had free access to BitKeeper, a proprietary version control system, Linus Torvalds couldn’t find a free replacement that met his needs. So he created his own: Git.

Slowly but surely, Git is conquering the world.

Today, a “social network for developers” based on the coolness of Git launched: GitHub.

One of the most impressing features of GitHub is their network visualiser. The visualiser shows open source software development in a whole new light. Very nice.

Once the book on Pragmatic Version Control With Git is out, I’ll have no excuse left not to convert to Git. All the cool kids seem to be using it. Git is in. Git is the new black.

Tim Berners-Lee gave a keynote speech at 3GSM last year where he discussed the difference between what he calls a foundation technology and a ceiling technology:

A foundation technology is designed to enable innovation, to be the base which will support other even more powerful things to come. A ceiling technology is not. It is designed to provide a value, and for its provider to cash in and cash out.

He can talk, he developed the most important foundation technology of recent times: The web.

In contrast to the web, instant messaging was largely developed as a ceiling technology. The big players, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo control more than 90% of the market and all of them rely on a closed technology. The result is that although lots of people use IM, the ecology of companies providing innovative solutions based on IM is tiny.

This is all about to change. XMPP, aka Jabber, is an open source instant messaging technology which had largely been exclusive to geeks until Google decided to base its GTalk client on the technology. Recently, it has been rumoured that AOL and even Microsoft will open up their networks to Jabber based clients.

ReadWriteWeb published an interesting article recently on how XMPP might be the future of cloud computing. Currently, the technology is being used by Tivo, Twitter, Mebo and many others and with the the possibility of other major players opening up their systems, 2008 might be the year when instant messaging evolves from being a ceiling technology to a foundation technology.

The time it takes from when a book appears on the radar to the moment I “proceed to checkout” is quite often affected by recommendations. An excellent blog I discovered recently tipped me over the edge last week when I bought a book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long while: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen.

I haven’t received it yet … so more on that later.

The book was recommended in a post about innovation at Google by Microsoft based blogger Dare Obasanjo.

Among other interesting posts by Dare are Improving Website Usability with A/B Testing which discusses an MS research paper that I highly recommended for any web based decision maker, and A-List Technology Bloggers: What Are They Good For? which outlines Dare’s take on Facebook and how those who don’t get it … don’t get it.

Finally, for those who like trivia, Dare is the son of Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo.

The beauty of launching an application like Walletproof on the web is its cross-platform interoperability. As long as a user has a web browser, he’s set.

In a recent post titled Facebook is the new AOL, Jason Kottke makes an interesting point about Facebook’s development platform and how its “walled garden” approach might represent a negative trend: If every big player on the web offers their own closed proprietary platform for developers to launch their products on, it becomes inefficient and expensive.

It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously … imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

Erick Schonfeld, editor of the excellent Business 2.0, discusses this in The Race to Become the Next AOL and he links to a story in the Financial Times where one of MySpace’s founders says they’ll probably follow Facebook’s lead and introduce their own development platform.

An example of a more constructive approach is the platform Netvibes launched recently for developing widgets: Netvibes UWA. They emphasise openness and if you write a widget for Netvibes, it will work in iGoogle, the Apple Dashboard and “many more”.

Creating walled gardens like the Facebook development platform may well make sense as a business decision. One thing is certain though, it won’t benefit the consumer.

Simon Branford, who studied high performance computing with me in Reading and is now a PhD student there, posted a link to the list of the world’s Top 500 Supercomputers. The computer they have in Reading ranked number 36 and is the fastest academic computer in the UK.

On a related, yet slightly ridiculous note, Computer World recently published a list of The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills (via Kottke). Up there in 6th place they put C-programming:

C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking, but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you’ll likely find a guy that’s unemployed and/or training for a new skill.

C is dead (or dying)! Who’s going to break the bad news to Linus, Guido and Matz?

If you want to utilize any of the top 500 supercomputers for some hard-core number crunching, you will probably stick with C.

Here’s another tip: If you find a programmer who knows only one programming language, don’t hire him.

Magic Ink (via Jason Kottke) is an essay by Bret Victor on information design. The essay contains some interesting graphics, including a redesign of Amazon’s search result display (see: before and after).

On a related note, the newest edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (IAWWW) just dropped in through the mailbox. The foreword is by none other than usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Jakob’s legendary site, Useit.com, receives far too little attention in the Web 2.0 world.

IAWWW has more than doubled in size since its groundbreaking first edition and the newest version is very up to date on the newest trends. Highly recommended.

While we’re on the theme of information design, the newest edition of A List Apart has an interesting article called Contrast and Meaning which reminds me of a book I once got hold of after seeing that Jason Fried of 37signals recommended it: Designing Visual Interfaces.